Read Online I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It by Charles Barkley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Charles Barkley
Tags: nonfiction
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and you miss a putt or miss a free throw with the game on the line, half the people are going to sympathize with you and the other half are going to say, “That sorry bastard choked like a dog!” In Philly, after a game I’d have 500 people standing and waiting for me. I’ve got dinner reservations and family members or guests waiting for me. If I sign 250 autographs, 250 hate my ass. You can sit there for an hour, hungry and ready to go to dinner and being rude to your family or friends, and you can’t please everybody.
Seriously, I get a thousand requests a week. And I try to do three to five things every week, and some of them take hours. But the people you can’t accommodate, a lot of them get really angry, which reminds me that no matter how much you do, a lot of people are going to be upset. Even if you signed a thousand autographs every day you couldn’t please everybody.
That’s why I say, “I’m going to do my own thing, say what I want to say, take stands I feel like taking even if they’re unpopular.”
E-mail, telephone and alcohol are the three primary ways people get brave. People come up to you after a couple of drinks and want to tell you what to say. And I tell them, “It’s okay to tell me you disagree with me, but don’t ever tell me what I can say and not say.”
But even with that being a downside, I enjoy the vast majority of the people I meet. I’ve had so many rewarding experiences, some of them from chance meetings, some from people just coming up and introducing themselves and wanting to talk about common experiences or something. I’m not going to let a tiny percentage of people stop me from enjoying that. I knew pretty early on that I was going to be in control as much as possible. I always say that I played basketball, it didn’t play me. But fame plays you. You’re only famous because somebody’s making money off you. You can’t control what anybody else does. You’ve got to make sure you make and keep your money, and otherwise try to live your life to the fullest extent that you want to. Some people aren’t that extroverted, but I am. I want to enjoy myself, as well as the people I come into contact with because it’s such a great life, why wouldn’t I?
That’s one of the things that I find funny when people say my life isn’t complete because I didn’t win an NBA championship. I have to laugh because with the exceptions of maybe Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, I don’t think I’d trade places with anybody. And I don’t even think I’d trade places with them, because the attention and inconvenience they have to put up with are several times more than mine.
Anyway, what else in life could I need when my life is pretty unbelievable already?
Being Rich
I’ve probably lost between $600,000 and $700,000 lending money to my friends and relatives. Most of the friends I’ve loaned money to won’t even speak to me now. It’s the strangest damned thing. It’s weird being rich and black because you’re caught between two worlds. Being rich really puts you in a predominantly white world. Overwhelmingly, everybody you work with outside of sports is white. But you don’t just stop liking things about the life you’ve lived, your old friends and your boys. You’ve outgrown most of them, really, but you really want to maintain relationships. And they want to borrow money and you do it. You say yes and it’s almost like buying friendship to stay in good with ’em. And then they turn on you, too. If you say no, it’s like, “You’re not going to give me any more money?”
And the line they use on you is, “Oh, you ain’t the same guy anymore!” They tell you how you’ve gone big-time and how they know you don’t want to be around them anymore. Next thing you know you’ve lent them hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’m not exaggerating. I’ve got the receipts to prove it. But you know what? I’m not going to ever ask their asses for my
Seriously, I get a thousand requests a week. And I try to do three to five things every week, and some of them take hours. But the people you can’t accommodate, a lot of them get really angry, which reminds me that no matter how much you do, a lot of people are going to be upset. Even if you signed a thousand autographs every day you couldn’t please everybody.
That’s why I say, “I’m going to do my own thing, say what I want to say, take stands I feel like taking even if they’re unpopular.”
E-mail, telephone and alcohol are the three primary ways people get brave. People come up to you after a couple of drinks and want to tell you what to say. And I tell them, “It’s okay to tell me you disagree with me, but don’t ever tell me what I can say and not say.”
But even with that being a downside, I enjoy the vast majority of the people I meet. I’ve had so many rewarding experiences, some of them from chance meetings, some from people just coming up and introducing themselves and wanting to talk about common experiences or something. I’m not going to let a tiny percentage of people stop me from enjoying that. I knew pretty early on that I was going to be in control as much as possible. I always say that I played basketball, it didn’t play me. But fame plays you. You’re only famous because somebody’s making money off you. You can’t control what anybody else does. You’ve got to make sure you make and keep your money, and otherwise try to live your life to the fullest extent that you want to. Some people aren’t that extroverted, but I am. I want to enjoy myself, as well as the people I come into contact with because it’s such a great life, why wouldn’t I?
That’s one of the things that I find funny when people say my life isn’t complete because I didn’t win an NBA championship. I have to laugh because with the exceptions of maybe Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, I don’t think I’d trade places with anybody. And I don’t even think I’d trade places with them, because the attention and inconvenience they have to put up with are several times more than mine.
Anyway, what else in life could I need when my life is pretty unbelievable already?
Being Rich
I’ve probably lost between $600,000 and $700,000 lending money to my friends and relatives. Most of the friends I’ve loaned money to won’t even speak to me now. It’s the strangest damned thing. It’s weird being rich and black because you’re caught between two worlds. Being rich really puts you in a predominantly white world. Overwhelmingly, everybody you work with outside of sports is white. But you don’t just stop liking things about the life you’ve lived, your old friends and your boys. You’ve outgrown most of them, really, but you really want to maintain relationships. And they want to borrow money and you do it. You say yes and it’s almost like buying friendship to stay in good with ’em. And then they turn on you, too. If you say no, it’s like, “You’re not going to give me any more money?”
And the line they use on you is, “Oh, you ain’t the same guy anymore!” They tell you how you’ve gone big-time and how they know you don’t want to be around them anymore. Next thing you know you’ve lent them hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’m not exaggerating. I’ve got the receipts to prove it. But you know what? I’m not going to ever ask their asses for my
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